Two years before declaring the independence of the United States of America, representatives of twelve English colonies along the eastern seabord of North America (all but Georgia) met in Philadelphia and signed their Articles of Association. Describing themselves as “his majesty’s most loyal subjects” and “avowing our allegiance to his majesty, our affection and regard for our fellow-subjects in Great-Britain and elsewhere,” the delegates nonetheless expressed “the deepest anxiety, and most alarming apprehensions, at those grievances and distresses, with which his Majesty’s American subjects are oppressed.” This “unhappy situation” had been caused by “a ruinous system of colony administration, adopted by the British ministry about the year 1763, evidently calculated for enslaving these colonies, and, with them, the British Empire.” Components of this system included revenue-raising measures; depriving some colonists of “the constitutional trial by jury”; and, by extending the border of Quebec to the western border of Massachusetts, making it possible to set the Catholic population of one side against the Protestants on the other. These acts against the colonists “threaten the lives, liberty, and property of his majesty’s subjects, in North-America.”
To meet these injustices and unjust threats, the delegates declared their intention, “under the sacred ties of virtue, honor, and love of our country,” to frame “a non-importation, non-consumption, and non-exportation agreement” among the colonies they represented. More specifically, they refused to import “any goods, wares, or merchandise whatsoever” from Great Britain or Ireland, along with various commodities (especially tea) from other parts of the empire. They would also discontinue the importation of slaves. Indeed, beginning in December 1775 the delegates would “wholly discontinue the slave trade, and will neither be concerned in it ourselves, nor will we hire our vessels, nor sell our commodities or manufactures to those who are concerned in it.” The delegates further intended both to increase the domestic production of the colonies and to reduce their demand for “every species of extravagance and dissipation, especially all horse-racing, and all kinds of games, cock fighting, exhibitions of shows, plays, and other expensive diversions and entertainments.” Finally, the delegates directed that “a committee be chosen in every county, city, and town, by those who are qualified to vote for representatives in the legislature, whose business it shall be attentively to observe the conduct of all persons touching this association”—committees of censors, in the classical sense. “When it shall be made to appear, to the satisfaction of a majority of any such committee, that any person within the limits of their appointment has violated this association, that such majority do forthwith cause the truth of the case to be published in the gazette; to the end, that all such foes to the right of British-America may be publicly known, and universally contemned as the enemies of American liberty; and thenceforth we respectively will break off all dealings with him or her.” In sum, “we do solemnly bind ourselves and our constituents, under the ties aforesaid.”
Threats to life, liberty, and property are threats to the principal natural rights enumerated in John Locke’s Essay on Civil Government. But the Articles of Association does not identify these rights as natural or unalienable, even if there is no reason to suppose that they did not so regard them. The delegates to this Continental Congress appealed primarily to civil rights guaranteed under the unwritten British constitution—”the rights of freemen” and “the liberties of [our] country.” They did not declare their independence from Great Britain, and so did not need to emphasize the natural character of the rights they asserted. Nor did they frame their declaration ‘philosophically,’ in the universal terms of rational argumentation. They clearly intend the Articles of Association to stand as a legal document for and by citizens who remain within the constitutional confines of the British regime and empire.
The 1776 Declaration of Independence is another matter. It repeats the charges made in the Articles of Association and indeed adds more, but these charges now find their place in a logical syllogism, an argument that in principle can be understood by human beings as such, by rational animals, rational creatures, and not only by those familiar with British constitutional law. A logical syllogism is an argument guided by the principle of non-contradiction, a principle first enunciated by Socrates in Plato’s Republic. There, Socrates says, “the same thing won’t be willing at the same time to do or to suffer opposites with respect to the same part and in relation to the same thing.” So, for example, I can draw a circle and a square; I might even inscribe one inside the other. But I cannot draw, or even conceive of, a square circle. Logical syllogisms consist of three parts: the major premise, the minor premise, and the conclusion. So, famously: all men are mortal; Socrates is a man; therefore, Socrates is mortal. One need not syllogize in words; geometrical proofs are syllogisms in lines. Modern ‘symbolic logic’ is just that; it consists of syllogizing with symbols instead of words.
A syllogism can be theoretical or practical—proving what is or what one must do. A practical syllogism concludes with a call for action, or at least a choice, a resolve. The Declaration of Independence is in one way theoretical, describing what “these United Colonies” are (free and independent of Great Britain), and in another way practical, stating what Americans have chosen to do (to act as free and independent states under one people). In his seminal article, “The Declaration of Independence and Eighteenth-Century Logic,” the historian Wilbur Samuel Howell explained that the Declaration follows the rules of logic set down by the most widely-used text of that time, the The Elements of Logick by William Duncan, first published in 1748. [1]. As per Duncan, the Signers first set down the major premises of their argument, the truths they hold to be self-evident; they then list the minor premises of the argument, the several charges against their “British brethren”; they conclude with their actual declaration of freedom and independence.
In law, a declaration is a formal complaint. In foreign policy, it is a formal announcement sent by an ambassador, under the law of nations—that combination of natural laws and conventional agreements and customs which in principle govern international relations. In the first paragraph here the delegates—now representing all thirteen colonies—say what it is that they are declaring and why they are declaring it. [2]
The Declaration of Independence begins with the phrase, “When in the course of human events….” Why don’t they say, more economically, “When in history…?” At the time of the American Founding, ‘history’ meant the historia rerum gestarum—the account or narrative of things that are born and pass away, the story of the course of human events. A ‘history’ was a literary genre, a narrative, and also a mode of inquiry. Philosophy and poetry are also modes of inquiry. In Plato’s Republic philosophy is the rational ascent from the cave of convention, into the daylight of truth, which is permanent. Poetry is the imitation of ‘imaging’ of true things—”holding the mirror up to nature,” as Dr. Johnson described it. History, however, put into words what had been seen, after inquiry, in human events; only then can those ever-changing events endure, be remembered. History fixes events, making them comprehensible to the intellect, which can understand only that which lasts long enough to be perceived and considered. Thus Thucydides writes a work “for all time” about what he calls “the greatest war of all time.” He chose for his inquiry a course of events that revealed something permanent in human nature.
In the middle of the eighteenth century ‘history’ increasingly came to be defined no longer as the historia rerum gestarum but as the res gestae, the course of events itself. To use a term invented later, ‘history’ was redefined ‘phenomenologically.’ ‘History’ was now said to be the ‘secularized’ and ‘rationalized’ equivalent of biblical Providence—secularized, because no personal God guided it; rationalized, because it was said to be governed by discernible laws by which events unfolded in predictable patterns. The name now used for this philosophic doctrine is ‘historicism.‘
This change in the definition of ‘history’ coincided with a moral and political crisis in philosophy. Where do moral and political right come from? In the ancient world, God or the gods were said to have laid down the moral and political law. Philosophers disagreed, some claiming that all moral and political right derives from convention, custom, human invention, others claiming that genuine moral and political right derives from nature, and especially from the nature of human beings. Insofar as the philosophers of the modern Enlightenment were thoroughgoing materialists, denying the existence of God or gods, they could not find right in them; insofar as those philosophers were atomists, defining ‘nature’ as nothing more than matter in motion, they could not longer find right in nature, either. This led some back to forms of conventionalism, as seen in the thought of David Hume and his well-known claim that no ‘ought’ can be derived from any non-conventional ‘is.’
Other philosophers deployed contemporary historicism as a solution to the ‘is-ought’ problem. They began to regard the course of events as the unfolding of human freedom in man’s conquest of nature—nature as understood to be without purpose or intrinsic worth. History is human progress. The greatest of the historicist philosophers was G. W. F. Hegel, a younger contemporary of the American Founders. But the Founders showed no interest in historicism. Natural right remains their standard, a standard Abraham Lincoln would defend nearly a century later.
The Declaration says that sometimes in the course of human events it “becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another.” Since the dissolution of political bands is an act of choice, “necessary” here means moral necessity, not physical necessity. But what is a “people,” the entity making this choice? A people must be somehow distinct from certain kinds of “political bands.” If a people were constituted by the political bands that link an empire together, then independence would mean self-immolation. And undoubtedly the English people distinguished themselves from the Irish, the Amerindian, and the Asian-Indian peoples, all of whom lived in their vast empire. Nor could a people be an ethnic group, simply. Of those living in the British colonies declaring their independence, even the ‘white’ population was heterogeneous, although not so heterogeneous as it would become. Approximately eighty percent were English and Welsh; seven percent were ‘Scotch-Irish’; six percent were German; five percent were Dutch; two percent were Irish Catholic. There were also free persons ‘of color,’ both Amerindian and African.
Although the Declaration does not define a “people,” it does mention four characteristics of any people. A people is capable of declaring the causes for its actions; a people holds a separate and equal “station” or status among the “powers of the earth,” and is entitled to do so according to the laws of Nature and of Nature’s God; a people is entitled to undertake reform and revolution of its government according to self-evaluated means to the natural or Creator-given ends of safety and happiness; a people can be represented by individuals elected by it, individuals thus empowered and legitimized to declare the causes for the people’s action, in its name. A people is not, therefore, any one person, family, or class. According to the Virginia Declaration of Rights, a people is synonymous with a nation or political community. That is, although it isn’t constituted by the political bands of empire, it is constituted in part by the political bands of some kind. These turn out to be the result of a free choice, the choice to join together into such a community. An individual or group may choose to reject that choice at the time it is offered, choose not to enter into a given civil society. Only free men and women can truly choose. Slaves are not part of the contract, and are therefore morally entitled to rebel against their masters, in accordance with natural right. Under a historicist doctrine, slavery presents a dilemma: Is slavery progress? If it is, then few if any such rebellions could be morally right. This is precisely what many apologists for slavery would contend in the years between the Founding and the Civil War.
If human beings were not entitled to rebel against tyranny, then the claim that they were revolutionizing colonial government by dissolving the political bands connecting them to Great Britain would make no sense. But the standard of natural right not only entitles human beings to rebel against tyranny, it also limits such rebellion. Political choice speaks through majority vote, but a majority of freemen, or a majority of slaves, might be mistaken. Popular sovereignty therefore must remain within the limits of natural right.
What is the distinction between the “Laws of Nature” and the laws of “Nature’s God”? The Laws of Nature are those discoverable by the power of the human mind unassisted by revelation; to the Founders, the most impressive of these was Newton’s law of gravity. Neither the pious man nor the skeptic will reject such a law outright, although either could inquire after it and possibly refute it. The Laws of Nature are both rational and rationally discoverable; natural law was discovered before the Christian era and independently of the revelations to Moses at Sinai. The laws of Nature’s God (an Enlightenment formula) are mentioned in divine revelation but need not be discovered by perception of that revelation. An example of such a law is the ‘argument from design’—the argument made by the Apostle Paul, but also by non-Christians before and after him, that the order of the world implies an intelligent Creator or at least Maker. Nature and nature’s God give laws to peoples, not only to individuals. They can therefore be civil-social and political. This is important because in 2 Corinthians 6:14 Paul tells the Church not to be “bound together with unbelievers” within God’s Kingdom. But God’s Kingdom is not the same as man’s civil government; in a political community of the latter kind, Christians and ‘secularists’ can indeed be bound together in defense of their commonly-held natural rights ordained by the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God.
Why do the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitle a people to a separate and equal station among the Powers of the Earth? Because, as seen in the Declaration’s second paragraph, individual human beings are created equal. Therefore, if naturally equal individuals freely choose to aggregate, to form a political community, that civil society or nation must be morally equal to any other such aggregation. This is why the 1787 Constitution requires that whenever a new state is admitted to the Union it comes in on an equal footing with the other states. This is also why “a decent respect for the opinions of mankind” requires a people which intends its independence to “declare the causes which impel them to the separation” from the empire in which they have been a part, the causes for dissolving the imperial political bands.
Along with this political claim the Founders make a geopolitical claim. The moral necessity to sever imperial political bonds brings with it the moral necessity entails a moral necessity or duty to declare the reasons for that choice. Why show “a decent respect for the opinions of mankind”? Practically speaking, it obviously makes sense to persuade other “powers of the earth” that your actions are just. More, unlike some of the modern philosophers (particularly the monarchist, Thomas Hobbes, and the democrat, Jean-Jacques Rousseau) the Founders affirmed the natural sociality of human beings. If human beings are social animals, opinion matters morally as well as rhetorically or tactically. A respect for opinion bespeaks regard for the nature of human beings—for what the Founders act to defend. A good example of this regard is George Washington’s list of the rules of civility. Also contra Hobbes, the Founders do not consider the state of nations to be a state of war, even though there is no common human sovereign. Wars will never disappear from the course of events, but neither will peace; the Founders aim at civil and international peace, even as they declare their independence under what they regard as a condition of war with the British regime and seek allies in that struggle.
What exactly is the moral necessity for declaring independence? In declaring their independence the Founders also declare their dependence—their dependence upon the Laws of Nature and of nature’s God. They begin the second paragraph of the Declaration with the major premises of the syllogism. “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness….” In her book On Revolution, Hannah Arendt argues that the phrase “We hold” is either superfluous or contradictory; if the truths are self-evident, do not all rational beings “hold” them? What does it mean to say a truth is self-evident?
In his principal philosophic work, the Essay Concerning Human Understanding, John Locke defines self-evident truths as statements about sense perceptions, which he calls “simple ideas.” ‘Black is not white.’ ‘Round is not square.’ “All men are created equal” is what Locke calls a “complex idea,” an idea that combines more than one sense perception; no such complex idea is self-evident. However, in Locke’s Essay on Civil Government, Locke writes of the condition or “state” of nature. The state of nature is a state of equality, “wherein all the Power and Jurisdiction is reciprocal, no one having more than any other: there being nothing more evident than that Creatures of the same species and rank promiscuously born to all the same advantages of nature, and the use of the same faculties, should also be equal one amongst another without Subordination or Subjection, unless the Lord and Master of them all, should by any manifest Declaration of his Will set one above another, and confer on him by an evident and clear appointment an undoubted right to Dominion and Sovereignty.” This natural equality of human beings, along with their “perfect Freedom to order their Actions, and dispose of their Possessions, and Persons as they think fit, within the bounds of the Law of nature, without asking leave, or depending upon the Will of any other Man,” is “evident in itself, beyond all question.” “Being furnished with like Faculties, sharing all in one Community of Nature, there cannot be supposed any such Subordination among us, that may Authorize us to destroy one another, as if we were made for another’s uses, as the inferior ranks of Creatures are for ours.” [3] Borrowing almost word-for-word from Algernon Sidney, Thomas Jefferson phrased it more vividly: “the mass of men has not been born with saddles on their backs, nor a favored few booted and spurred, ready to ride them legitimately, by the grace of God.” [4] This isn’t a self-evident truth in Locke’s precise, philosophic sense, but it is a straightforward deduction from such truths. Human beings are by definition all the same species; if so, on some level every individual within that species, that ‘kind,’ is equal to every other member. That is, as the saying goes, close enough for government work. [5]
“Created equal” also means that human beings are “endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights.” “Unalienable” means you can’t give them away, even if you want to. Who or what is the Creator endowing all men with rights they cannot alienate from themselves? The question is crucial to the alliance between Bible-believing Americans such as John Witherspoon and Enlightenment secularists such as Benjamin Franklin. “Creator” undoubtedly can mean the God of Abraham, who created the cosmos ex nihilo and created man and woman (but not ex nihilo). “Creator” can also mean, much more generally, the god of the Deists, a non-providential god who formed the cosmos but no longer governs it. With some stretching, “Creator” might also mean “Nature,” and on a political terrain that requires hanging together lest all hang separately, theological disputes might well be laid aside in defense of the right to live at liberty, pursuing happiness.
Many commentators have observed that the Declaration’s references to God parallel the three ‘branches’ of government seen in the United States Constitution. God is the chief legislator, laying down the laws of nature; He is the chief justice, the “Supreme Judge of the world”; and He is the chief executive, invoked as the protector of Americans in the Declaration’s last sentence. Philosophically considered, the three rights specifically named—life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness—parallel the three parts of the soul identified by Socrates in Plato’s Republic, life being the desire for bodily health and satisfaction, liberty being one purpose of thumos or spiritedness, and the pursuit of happiness being a purpose of logos, of the fulfillment of the nature of human beings as rational beings. In Locke, the right to liberty serves the right to life and the right to the pursuit of happiness. While in Locke the pursuit of happiness means the enjoyment of pleasure and the avoidance of pain, pleasure and pain need not be understood merely in terms of the body, as the distinctively human soul consists of more than bodily desires.
The purpose of government is “to secure these rights.” Government is not natural in the sense that God endows us with a specific kind of government—the claim of divine-right monarchists. God has made human beings naturally social beings with unalienable natural rights; the governments human beings institute among themselves “deriv[e] their just powers from the consent of the governed.” Given the nature of human beings, “consent” cannot mean mere ‘assent’; it must mean rational assent, assent consistent with Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God. “Whenever any Form of Government”—any regime—”becomes destructive of these ends”—the rights government is intended to secure—”it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.” This right to regime change or revolution follows logically from the purpose of government, just as the purpose of government follows logically from the existence of unalienable natural rights in all human beings.
How can revolution against an imperial or even tyrannical regime justified in Christian terms? In Romans 13 Paul wrote, “Let every man be in subjection to the governing authorities. For there is no authority except from God, and those which exist are established by God.” Governing authorities, as ministers of God, avenge Him for men’s evil practices, “wherefore it is necessary to be in subjection, not only because of wrath, but also for conscience’s sake.” Very pointedly, given the Founders’ circumstance, Paul went to to write, “because of this you also pay taxes.” To this teaching of conscience and Scripture, the Founders replied, true government secures God-given unalienable rights; a government that assaults natural right is no true government. They do not resist paying taxes; they resist paying taxes to a government in which they are not represented in the supreme legislature.
The individual conscience that perceives unalienable rights, and the political and perhaps individual conscience that perceives duties, require the overthrow of false government and the establishment of true government, both actions to be governed by prudence or practical wisdom. After saying that safety and happiness are the ends to be effected by government, the Founders’ very next word is “prudence”: “Prudence, indeed, will dictate that governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shown, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed.” Such is the power of habit over human conduct. Sophia (as in philo-sophia) means theoretical wisdom, attained by rational consideration of permanent things, including the principles or laws that govern change; phronēsis or prudence means rational consideration of contingent things, things we deliberate about, things we choose. Prudence is not mere calculation of advantage. It aims at finding the means of securing safety and happiness, of living well. It is not theory but relates to theory, because theoretical reasoning tells us what ‘living well’ is. Prudence guides us to the means of obtaining the ends of human life that theoretical reasoning discovers.
Prudential reasoning is itself an exercise of human virtue. Prudence becomes severed from theory by Hobbes, who replaces the summum bonum of happiness with a summum malum—the fear of violent death. Hobbes associates prudence primarily with experience, inasmuch as he charges that theorizing—thinking about what is good for human beings as such—breeds sedition, especially conflict over religion. The Founders show the way toward establishing a regime that defines the human good in terms that are self-evident, recognized by most (though not all) religious believers and by most (though not all) ‘secularists.’ As for prudence, Jesus of Nazareth Himself sends His disciples “out as sheep in the midst of wolves”: “therefore,” he commands, “be as prudent as serpents, and harmless as doves” (Matthew 10:16). The Declaration silently rejects pacifist or nonresistant Christianity, not on the grounds of absolute fidelity to moral principle—Christianity no less than the Founders requires that human actions be governed by prudence—and not in deference to governing authorities—Christians do not consent to obey evil-doing rulers—but with respect to the proper response to evil. Nonresistant Christianity turns the other cheek, personally and politically. The Declaration does not extend the precept “Resist not evil” to political matters, to the actions of peoples, and in this it stands with the vast majority of Christians, then and now.
Under a tyrannical regime, prudence aims first at revolution, but then no less at reconstruction, the founding of a new regime. That was the work of the 1787 Constitutional Convention. There, prudential reasoning led to a work of architectonic political science, the United States Constitution, which constitutes a regime capable of maintaining civil peace for American citizens and international peace with other powers of the earth, a regime strong enough to sustain violent challenges domestic and foreign but more usually engaged in peaceful commerce in all goods, whether they are material, spiritual, or intellectual.
In what way did prudential reasoning guided by the principles of unalienable natural right affect the institution of slavery, the most obvious contradiction of those principles? In 1776 slavery existed in all thirteen states. Of the 2.1 million Americans, slightly less than twenty percent were slaves. In 1798 slave importation had been abolished in all of the states, although South Carolina renewed the practice in 1808. In that year Congress abolished the slave trade, and by 1810 eight states had abolished slavery itself. Even in the South, where the slavery was most ingrained in civil society, numerous manumissions occurred. In 1776 there were 27,000 free blacks in the North, 32,000 in the South; by 1810 there were 78,000 free blacks, 27,500 slaves in the North, while in the South there were 108,000 free blacks and 1.2 million slaves. It was the generation after the Founding that saw a turn away from gradual emancipation, beginning around 1830. The presence of such large numbers of slaves in the South presented Americans with a fundamental political problem, and not only a moral and economic one. As James Madison observed in the 1790s, “in proportion as slavery prevails in a State, the Government, however democratic in name, must be aristocratic in fact. The power lies in a part instead of the whole, in the hands of property, not of numbers. All the ancient popular governments were, for this reason, aristocracies. The majority [of the population’ were slaves…. The Southern States of America are, on the same principle, aristocracies.” [6] Article IV, section 4 of the Constitution requires a republican regime in every state; as the regime difference between the Northern and Southern states deepened in the 1840s and 1850s, civil war ‘between the states’ (more precisely between a confederacy of some states against the federal government) became unavoidable, despite the Founders’ best efforts and the several attempts (temporarily successful) to find a compromise solution to an uncompromisable political contradiction.
In 1776 the more general form of oppression facing all Americans, free and slave, emanated from the regime of the British Empire. “The history of the present King of Great Britain is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute Tyranny over these States.” The eighteen injuries and usurpations listed in the Declaration constitute the minor premises of the syllogism. Because they enumerate actions by a monarch (each begins with the phrase “He has”), they stand as a description of the things monarchs do when they intend to establish tyranny. This makes the Declaration permanently useful, a warning for any time.
The list is orderly, part of the overall syllogism. It is a list of weightier and weightier evils, going from bad to worse to worst—from violations of liberty to violations of the right to life itself. The list also moves from legislative abuses (the first seven) to judicial abuses (the next two) to executive abuses (the final nine). The thirteenth abuse has ten subdivisions, an enumeration of George III’s “pretended acts of legislation,” that is, executive acts disguised as legislative acts.
The legislative abuses consist of royal attempts to interfere with the colonial assemblies’ operations—requiring the monarch’s approval of the colonists’ legislation, a process in which he often proved dilatory; long-delayed reapportionment legislative districts to enable new settlers representation (“a right inestimable to them and formidable to tyrants only”); allowing royal governors to call legislative sessions “at places unusual, uncomfortable, and distant from the depository of their public Records, for the sole purpose of fatiguing them into compliance with his measures”; dissolution of colonial legislatures altogether; refusing to permit new elections for long periods of time after such dissolutions; and impeding population increase in the colonies by “obstructing the Laws for Naturalization of Foreigners.” Taken together, these abuses amounted to a refusal to allow the colonists to govern themselves according to the rule of law.
The judicial abuses consist of royal attempts to deprive the colonists of self-government in the courts by refusing to approve laws for establishing judiciary powers in North Carolina and making “Judges dependent on his Will alone, for the tenure of their offices, and the amount and payment of their salaries.” The monarch thus intends to control both the legislatures that make laws and the courts that adjudicate cases under those laws.
The monarch’s abuses of executive power are the most immediately damaging. Beginning with the Townsend Acts of 1767, he has established what we would call a bureaucracy—”a multitude of New Offices” filled with “swarms of Officers to harass our people, and eat out their substance.” He keeps standing armies on American soil in times of peace, without the consent of American legislatures, and in Massachusetts appointed a military governor. The multi-part thirteenth abuse flows from the monarch’s alliance with the British Parliament in passing the Declaratory Act of 1766, asserting the right to rule the colonies by executive orders and Parliamentary legislation—a Parliament in which the colonists have no representatives. This has empowered the British state to quarter troops in America at the colonists’ expense; to protect the troops from punishment for crimes committed against Americans by holding the trial in England while also trying Americans accused of treason in England; to restrict American trade and impose taxes on Americans without Americans’ consent; for enacting the 1774 Quebec Act, which established French civil law in Quebec and extended Quebec’s borders to the Ohio River—”enlarging its Boundaries so as to render it at once an example and fit instrument for introducing the same absolute rule into these Colonies” in contravention of English common law. In addition, monarch and Parliament devised the Massachusetts Government Act of 1774, vastly increasing the monarch’s direct control over all branches of that colony’s government, down to the municipal level and suspended the New York Assembly for failing fully to implement the Quartering Act of 1765.
The Founders reserved the five most damaging charges for last. “He has abdicated Government here, by declaring us out of his Protection and waging War against us” at Lexington, Concord, and Bunker Hill. That is, the monarch has done more than change the regimes of the American colonies; he has done more than attempt to convert the British Empire into a modern, centralized state complete with a professional bureaucracy and a standing army. He has gone from civil government to warfare, having “plundered our seas, ravaged our coasts, burnt our towns, and destroyed the lives of our people.” On land, he has hired “foreign Mercenaries to complete the works of death, desolation,and tyranny, already begun with circumstances of Cruelty and perfidy scarcely paralleled in the most barbarous ages, and totally unworthy the Head of a civilized nation”—acts undermining not only government but civil society. He has coerced American citizens to bear arms against their country by conscripting American sailors on ships seized under the Restraining Acts of 1775. Finally, “he has excited domestic insurrections amongst us, and has endeavored to bring on the inhabitants of our frontiers, the merciless Indian Savages, whose known rule of warfare, is an undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes and conditions”—dissolving the American colonies into a sort of chaos. If unalienable natural rights are endowed by our Creator, the monarch has effected a sort of anti-creation.
The phrase “merciless Indian Savages” today is often taken to refer to all Amerindian nations and tribes then in contact with American colonists. This is wrong. Americans distinguished between civilized and savage Amerindians. The “Five Civilized Tribes” in the South were quite unlike the Iroquois (for example), who did indeed wage warfare as described. With regard to the incitement of slave rebellions, Thomas Jefferson’s original draft of the Declaration put the matter in much stronger language, language which completed the list of charges: “He has waged cruel war against human nature itself, violating it most sacred rights of life and liberty in the persons of a distant people who never offended him, captivating and carrying them into slavery in another hemisphere, or to incur miserable death in their transportation thither. This piratical warfare, the opprobrium of infidel powers”—several Muslim monarchs had abolished the slave trade—”is the warfare of the CHRISTIAN king of Great Britain, determined to keep open a market where MEN should be bought and sold,he has prostituted his negative [i.e., his veto power] for suppressing every legislative attempt to prohibit or to restrain this execrable commerce: and that this assemblage of horrors might want no fact of distinguished die, he is now exciting those very people to rise in arms among us, and to purchase that liberty of which he has deprived them, by murdering the people upon whom he also obtruded them; thus paying off former crimes committed against the liberties of one people, with crimes which he urges them to commit against the lives of another.”
With this eighteenth charge against the monarch, the minor premises of the syllogism have been stated. These minor premises cite acts contradictory to the major premises, specific violations of the fundamental principles of natural right. The Founders now draw three logical conclusions. First, because petitions for redress of grievances by the colonists “have been answered only by repeated injuries,” this “Prince, whose character is thus marked by every act which may define a tyrant, is unfit to be the ruler of a free people.” Second, the British people themselves “have been deaf to the voice of justice and of consanguinity”; Americans “must, therefore, acquiesce in the necessity” to separate from them, holding them, “as we hold the rest of mankind, Enemies in War, in Peace Friends.” Even if, per impossibile, the monarch were to abdicate, separation from the English people themselves would stand. Finally, “appealing to the Supreme Judge of the world for the rectitude of our intentions”—something only the omniscient God can see—Americans declare “that these United Colonies are, and of Right ought to be Free and Independent States,” with no more “political connection” with the British state. “As Free and Independent States,” the American colonies therefore “have full Power to levy War, conclude Peace, contract Alliances, establish Commerce, and to do all other Acts and Things which Independent States may of right do.” Since the monarch by his tyrannical actions has abdicated government of these colonies, they are independent in fact; having done so by violating the colonists’ natural rights, he has made them independent in right. The Americans are merely declaring the independence that the monarch has granted them in action while denying it in words.
Reinforcing the prudential as well as the ‘theoretical’ character of their declaration, the Founders conclude: “And for the support of this Declaration, with a firm reliance on the protection of divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes, and our sacred Honor.” They request divine protection while swearing to mutual protection. Divine protection will guide the course of events invoked in the first sentence. To pledge lives is to pledge bodies, to fight to the death in defense of the right to life. To pledge fortunes is to pledge the material means of supporting lives, the property the right to liberty protects and enhances. To pledge honor, and to hold it sacred, is to pledge something entirely non-material, recognizing that loyalty to one another, fidelity to human beings paralleling fidelity to God, can sustain a free people in its freedom.
Notes
- Wilbur Samuel Howell: “The Declaration of Independence and Eighteenth Century Logic.” William and Mary Quarterly, third series, 18 (1961), 463-484.
- For a discussion of the several meanings of ‘declaration,’ see David Armitage: The Declaration of Independence: A Global History (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2007), 14-18, 30-40.
- John Locke: Essay on Civil Government, II.ii.4-5. The scholar who first drew attention to this passage was Harry V. Jaffa: How to Think About the American Revolution: A Bicentennial Cerebration (Durham: Carolina Academic Press, 1978) III. 75-122. This reading is broadly consistent with Duncan, who defines a self-evident truth as one that “admits not of any Proof, because a bare Attention to the Ideas themselves, produces full Conviction and Certainty” (Duncan: The Elements of Logick, VI.119).
- Thomas Jefferson: Letter to Roger Weightman, June 24, 1826. Paul Leicester Ford, ed.: The Writings of Thomas Jefferson (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons), VIII.3.
- And again, it resembles Duncan’s discussion, cited above.
- James Madison, “Notes for the National Gazette Essays.” The Papers of James Madison, XIII.163.
Recent Comments